


Closed Casket

by rionaleonhart



Category: Silent Hill (Video Game Series)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-08-16
Updated: 2005-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:02:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23963563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rionaleonhart/pseuds/rionaleonhart
Summary: Maria finds herself in a room with Angela.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	Closed Casket

When Maria woke up, she was trapped in a room.

The handle of the door wouldn’t move when she tried to turn it – not at all, not even slightly – and neither did the door itself, not even when she slammed herself into it with all her strength. The room was quiet and wood-panelled and had a television in the corner that wouldn’t turn on – perhaps the button was stuck, because she couldn’t even push it down – and there were paintings on the walls and there was nothing else. She tried the door again, and then, because she couldn't leave, she began looking at the paintings. They were ordinary enough; scenes of the town, mostly; paintings of the apartments, the bar, a painting of a mountainous landscape that Maria didn’t recognise. As she moved to look at the next picture, her hand brushed against the table on which the television was resting. She paused, looking back at it.

Something was wrong.

The table seemed normal enough – a smallish wooden table, with a light covering of dust on it. She ran her hand over the wood again.

Nothing happened.

Something was wrong.

She tried again... and suddenly she realised what it was. She could feel the wood under her hand, yes, and she could feel the dustiness of it, but when she took her hand away there was no dust clinging to it, and brushing her hand across the wood didn't move the dust at all.

-

Sometimes there would be something about the room that she hadn't noticed before. One day (or was it a day? It was hard to tell, she had been inside for so long...) there was a new picture – a faded painting of Toluca Lake, with the hotel in the background, brown-and-grey. She examined it closely, because there was nothing else for her to do, and presently she noticed that there were markings scratched into the frame. Without thinking, she brushed her fingers across the markings, and was surprised when they came away dusty. She hadn’t been able to move the dust on any of the other paintings – this was something that she could actually _touch_.

She brushed away the rest of the dust from the writing, and moved closer in order to read it properly.

_this is his ending._

There was a dark shape in the water, she realised. There was a dark shape in the water, and Maria didn’t want to look too closely because she was afraid that she might realise what it was, but she kept looking at it anyway. She tried not to think about it, but she thought about it anyway. It was too large to be a body.

-

One day (how long had she been here? Days, weeks, months? It was so easy to lose track of time in this place...), she woke up and there was another person in the room.

Her hair was dark and her eyes were closed, and she sat hunched against the wall in the corner furthest from the door, completely still. Maria thought at first that she was dead, but then she saw that she was breathing slowly, quietly. Maria asked if she was okay, what had happened, how she had managed to get into the room, but the girl didn’t even seem to notice. Maria walked over to the door and tried it, and it was still locked, so she walked back over and crouched down next to her.

After some time – she didn’t know how long she had spent crouching there, just watching her breathe – the girl shuddered and began to speak, and Maria thought at first that she was talking to her, but she was talking about people who Maria didn’t know and things that Maria hadn’t done, and then she said _Angela_ and Maria knew that she was talking to herself.

_Angela_. Maria didn’t know why, but it seemed a fitting name.

She must have gone to sleep at some point, without realising it, because when she woke up Angela was lying curled up on the ground, her eyes almost closed, her face half-hidden in her arms. Maria crouched beside her again and tried to move her arms away, tried to see her expression, but it was impossible. The girl was just like everything else in the room: she was warm and real and solid, but Maria couldn’t manipulate her.

She said Angela’s name quietly, and pretended that she had seen her move in response. She tried to comfort her; vague promises that things would get better, whatever _things_ were; but she couldn’t pretend that her words had any effect. Angela just lay there, unmoving and miserable.

Maria wanted to _help_ her.

-

She would try to speak to Angela, sometimes. Angela never seemed to see or hear her, but she found it somehow relaxing, having somebody she could speak to without being answered. There was frustration too, though, when she wanted a _human_ to speak with. Why couldn’t Angela hear her? Why would she not respond?

Sometimes, Maria thought that perhaps Angela didn’t exist. Perhaps she was just a figment of her imagination, conjured from her desire to have somebody with her. Perhaps Maria was imagining the whole room, and that was why she couldn’t touch anything.

There was still the painting, though.

Sometimes, Angela would stand up and walk around the room a little. Sometimes she would look at the paintings, and Maria would follow her, watching with envy the way her touch disturbed the dust on the frames. But she would never look at the painting of the lake, and Maria would go to it afterwards, revelling in her ability to brush away the dust and the flakes of paint from this, the only thing she had that could prove to her that she was still real, she was still _alive_.

Whenever she looked away from it, though, the dust would return. Once she glanced over at Angela while her fingers were still resting on the frame, and when she turned back the fine dust had covered her hand and crawled halfway up her arm. She didn’t look at the picture so much after that.

The paintings that Angela looked at were strange – paintings of forests and knives and bedrooms, and most of them were red-tinted, and Maria didn’t think that any of them had been there before Angela arrived. There was one painting of a staircase that Angela would always come back to, and Maria couldn’t see why.

-

When Angela cried out, Maria had been completely unprepared, and she started and covered her ears when the desperate shouting filled the room. Angela was backing into a corner, her expression terrified, pleading with something that wasn’t there. When her back hit the wall she lashed out at nothing, sobbing, and then she seized the television from the table next to her and threw it across the room and fell to her knees and wept.

Maria stood uncertainly, not knowing what to do – there was nothing she _could_ do, Angela couldn’t see or hear her – and eventually she walked over to the broken television and tried not to listen to the sobs, tried to gather up the shards of glass. She wasn’t surprised when she found that she couldn’t lift them.

When she woke next the television was back in its usual place, the screen looking somehow as if it had never shattered, and Angela’s staircase was on fire. Angela seemed not to notice anything strange when she looked at the painting, and Maria found herself wondering whether she had painted the flames in herself.


End file.
